Just How Successful Has The Fallout 4 Xbox One Mod Launch Been?

The Xbox One can now officially support user mods for Fallout 4. No you won't get massive HD texture overhauls or nude mods, but you can get new weapons, skins, quests and other mods to enhance the gameplay experience, and all of it has been quite popular in the Xbox community, causing enough of a surge to bring down Bethesda's servers briefly.

According to Game Informer Bethesda noted that their servers were crushed for a while due to all of the Xbox One gamers signing in to download mods. They announced that the Xbox One mod roll out generated 50 times the amount of traffic that the official PC mod support generated. They also noted that they would be using the metrics to learn and improve the mod support for Fallout 4 across home consoles and PC.

While that nebulous but large figure is impressive, keep in mind that official mod support for PC arrived late to the party, and PC gamers aren't required to go through Bethesda's official servers or website to acquire mods or the modding tools.

In fact, mods were popping up for Fallout 4 on PC the day that the game launched back on November 10th, 2015. A steady stream of mods have been rolling out ever since in the PC gaming community. Additionally, PC gamers can get mods from anywhere on the net, from the Steam Workshop and ModDB to the ubiquitously popular Nexus Mods; PC gamers aren't beholden to getting their mods through Bethesda. Thus, this results in the actual user count for accessing Fallout 4 mods on PC being scattered across multiple sources.

So the figure of Xbox One owners generating 50 times more traffic on Bethesda's servers than PC gamers with the official launch of mod support yesterday on May 31st, is actually a disingenuous figure.

Even still, it's impressive that so many gamers can trampling across the internet to try out some of the mods for Fallout 4. Console gamers are getting a small sampling of what it's like to play with enhanced versions of games thanks to mods.

Unfortunately, this support comes with a few limitations. For one, only 2GB worth of mods can be installed at any one time. You cannot exceed the 2GB threshold. This means that you can get some texture upgrades, weapon upgrades and even model upgrades, but all of it has to be kept under 2GB. It's funny because some of the building mods and vegetation mods can skyrocket up to 1GB alone. So you will have to exercise a lot of consideration on how your space is used when installing the mods.

The reason for the limit is that the Xbox One has shared RAM, and 3GB of the total 8GB pool is reserved for system resources. The other 5GB is for primary applications, and running Fallout 4 takes up enough of the memory that there's only room for 2GB worth of mods. Exceeding that would potentially cause the game to crash.

What's more is that saved games can be used with mods but Bethesda automatically generates a second saved file for mods, this way your saved game doesn't become corrupted or glitched up, which often happens when dealing with mods. Also, Achievements and Trophies are automatically disabled when mods are active, so you can't unlock Achievements or Trophies through a modded save file.

Fallout 4 mods are available right now on Xbox One and will be available on PS4 later in June.